Falling Towers: A Letter to my Child’s Teacher

Abstract

Using the epistolary genre, this editorial is embedded in a fictional letter written to a teacher. The discussion is spurred by a teacher writing a mark in bold felt pen directly on a student’s drawing of the Eiffel Tower. This reflexive inquiry laments the deep wounding of the joy of learning by metrics, measurements and efficiency, while registering the imperative to change this path. Using the metaphor of the “tower” to theorize current damaging curricular practices, this editorial questions how, amidst the uncontrol and fear in a global pandemic, the challenging truths of unmarked graves, devastating climate disasters, global food insecurity, among other sufferings, teachers can imagine hope-inspired, healing-centred pedagogies and ”assertive mutuality . . . [through] co-action, interconnection . . . [and] the capacity to act and implement as opposed to the ability to control others” (Kreisberg, 1992, p. 86). The task of recognizing, naming and dismantling towers—in essence, leaving one’s home, and building new relational frames, while the world is falling—requires extraordinary hope, as shown in the articles in this issue.